For ABC News and the corporate media, it is a foregone conclusion. The Christmas underwear bomber is al-Qaeda.

“He sat up and videotaped the
entire thing, very calmly. We do know that the FBI is looking for him
intensely. Since then, we’ve heard nothing about it.”

“American officials have cause to worry there may be more al
Qaeda-trained young men in Yemen planning to bring down American jets,”
report Brian Ross and Richard Esposito.
“Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, charged with the attempted Christmas Day
bombing of Northwest Airlines flight 253, told FBI agents there were
more just like him in Yemen who would strike soon.”

And then there is the supposed tape released four days before the
attempted underwear bombing. It shows what ABC describes as “the leader
of al Qaeda in Yemen” who says he will kill Americans. “We are carrying
a bomb to hit the enemies of God.”

“Yemen has become a principal al Qaeda training ground and the
accused suicide bomber told the FBI he was trained for more than a
month in Yemen, given 80 grams of a high explosive cleverly sewn into
his underpants, undetected by standard security screening.”

On Sunday, the neocon Joe Lieberman
said the U.S. needs to bomb Yemen and pronto. “Iraq was yesterday’s
war, Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen
will be tomorrow’s war,” the “hawkish” (neocon) senator from
Connecticut told Fox News.

Lieberman, who helms the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee, said Yemen is the new home of al-Qaeda. A script on
Yemen and al-Qaeda is now being uniformly followed by the corporate
media.

Meanwhile, more suspicious information about the underwear bombing has
surfaced. An eye witness told the news talk radio station 620 WTMJ in Milwaukee that a man had videotaped the entire flight.

Patricia “Scotty” Keepman and her daughter witnessed the alleged
botched bombing. Keepman’s “daughter said that ahead of them was a man
who videotaped the entire flight, including the attempted detonation.”

“He sat up and videotaped the entire thing, very calmly,” said
Patricia. “We do know that the FBI is looking for him intensely. Since
then, we’ve heard nothing about it.”

On Saturday it was reported
that a “sharp-dressed man” had escorted Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab when
he boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam. Mutallab was
allowed on the plane without a passport. It was later reported that
Mutallab seemed to be in a trance.

The alleged videotaping of the underwear bomber and his fudged
attack is another oddity that the corporate media should zoom in on.
Unfortunately, we no longer have a functioning investigative media in
this country.

Instead we will hear endless pabulum about a resurgent al-Qaeda and
murderous idiocy from neocons like Joe Lieberman who are screaming for
another small and defenseless country to be bombed and more innocents
slaughtered as the U.S. chases a phantom terror group created by the
CIA.